On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (6 page)

5. RAF Cosford

I left secondary modern school a the age of fourteen, since we broke up for the summer holidays before I reached fifteen years. There were no exams for secondary modern children in those days, so like all my classmates I left without proof of an education of any kind. I went to work in a grocery store in Bridgnorth, one of those grand stores we had in those days with sacks of grain and other produce standing on the floor with little trowels stuck in them to shovel the stuff into bags. In the shop itself there was a huge wooden bay-shaped counter with around four or five assistants in dustcoats, waiting to serve customers. It was my job to dash back and forth between the counter and the cellar, carrying cheeses and hams, and anything else that the public might demand.

After working there for a month, for sixpence an hour, my mother stopped by at the shop. The manager called me up from the cellar and my mother asked him how I was getting on. ‘Very well,’ said the manager, beaming at me, ‘very well. If he keeps this up we’ll have him on the counter in five years.’ My mother was clearly pleased to hear such praise, but looking along the counter I had a panic attack. All I could see were five grey-faced men, bloodless figures in khaki dustcoats, looking as my mother would say, ‘like Death warmed-up’.

I went home that evening and told my parents that I wanted to join the Royal Air Force. It seemed my only avenue of escape from a life of tedium and dullness. The easiest way to join at the age of fifteen was to apply to the Royal Air Force for Boys’ Service. Their schools provided courses of education and technical training. The ‘graduate’ was then expected to do at least twelve years’ military service.

I tried for the Apprentices first, the cream of these schools, and took the train to RAF Halton in Bucks for my interview. My weak education immediately exposed me. I fared badly in the entrance examination. I was told that if I improved a little over the next six months I stood a chance of getting on to the Administration Branch course. I didn’t want to be a ‘pen-pusher’, though it doesn’t seem so terrible to me now. I was a romantic in those days and had seen too many war films starring John Mills. Obviously I couldn’t be a pilot with my background, but I wanted something more exciting than an office.

So off I went to RAF Cosford in Staffordshire, to try my luck there, where they were not so fussy. The Boy Entrants examination board snapped me up. Why wouldn’t they, when they snapped up ex-Borstal Boys just as swiftly. I was shown around the ‘workshops’, where the Boys received trade training. I was impressed by Photography and Radio Mechanic, found the idea of being a Cook or Supplier not to my liking, but finally came to the Telegraphists’ classrooms. Here were Morse keys, teleprinters and radio sets to be operated. Yes, it said to me, you can be the ‘Sparks’ (the shoulder flash of a telegraphist was a hand clutching javelins of lightning) in John Mills’s Lancaster bomber.

‘Send a message to command, Sparks – the port engines are on fire, the tail gunner’s shot to pieces and the navigator’s gone mad.’

Yes, that was for me. The romantic figure of a wireless operator hunched over his key, clicking out Morse code at twenty-five words a minute, thus saving the lives of the crew.

There is also something about ‘secrets’ which appeals to a romantic mind. Morse was a secret code, a foreign language known only to a very few special mortals. I was to learn that code and be one of those very few. I would also learn to touch-type (very useful later in life, when I became a writer) and be taught formulas for the mathematics of electronics, learn about valves, resistors, circuits and other secrets of the radio world. The job appealed to me enormously. Of course, when I left Cosford and actually came to do the work, it was not as romantic as I imagined it would be, but still it was sometimes exciting and interesting, which is as much as you can expect from any daily job.

The RAF is a way of life and one I was used to, my family having been part of it since I was born. I said goodbye to my mum and dad, and my two brothers, and took the train from Bridgnorth to Wolverhampton, a relatively short distance since the counties were adjoining. On the steam train from Wolverhampton to Cosford I shared a carriage with John Chidlow, a miner’s son from Mansfield. We became firm friends and would follow each other around as we were posted from station to station, once we had ‘passed out’, which is the military term for ‘graduated’. I have always called him ‘Chid’ because are were too many other ‘Johns’ around.

Arriving at No 2 School of Technical Training our hair was shaved off and we were marched into a large room to take the oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II. Our overall loyalty was not to the RAF, not to the officers who lorded it over us, but to Her Majesty, the monarch of Great Britain and several remaining colonies. This, we were told, ensured against a military revolution. There were ninety-six would-be telegraphists of the ‘29th Entry’. Some of the fifteen-year-olds in that room, they told us, would ‘fall by the wayside’.

I was determined the wayside would not experience me falling into it, since I had a horror of returning to that grocery store.

Coming from an RAF family I at least knew what to expect: much was familiar to me, from the accommodation to the yelled orders from Drill Instructors. My own father, at that time, was a Drill Instructor. Some of the boys however, hailing from the backstreets of Liverpool or from a remote farm in Wiltshire, were completely shell-shocked. They did not know whether they were coming or going and wandered around in a sort of bemused haze while fierce, hard-eyed men in blue serge uniforms barked unintelligible sounds at them.

The first three months at Cosford would be spent in the Initial Training Squadron (ITS) lines. These were wooden huts spaced apart in a row with a spinal corridor running down the middle. The spinal column was where the toilets were situated, the ironing rooms and the drying rooms. The long wooden billets, exactly like the huts you see in prisoner of war films like
Stalag 17
and
The Great Escape
, each housed twenty boys in two rows of ten down each side. All the billets had a potbellied stove in their middles. Every boy had a bedspace, a tall locker and a short locker. We were issued our kit and immediately had to go to work on it, shining boots, brasses and blanco-ing belts with blue blanco, which I now see as an anomaly,
blanco
meaning ‘white’ in Spanish, but there you go, the word is now an English one.

When polishing the raw boots, which would eventually have to shine like polished mirrors, we were shown how to melt the polish in its tin lid, pour it on the boot toe like wax, and then spend several centuries rubbing it into the leather with a tiny finger-swirling motion.

Our kit, if you are at all interested, consisted of the following:

blankets
sheets
PT kit
greatcoat (which, unlike the rest of the clothes, remained the property of the Queen)
rain cape
battledress
webbing belt
webbing backpack and straps
ceramic mug
irons (knife, fork and spoon)
socks
shirts
detached collars, collar studs
vests
aertex shreddies (underpants)
peaked cap for formal occasions
beret for informal
Best Blue (Sunday uniform) made not of worsted like the battledress but of gabardine
brass button slider
housewife (sewing kit)
kit bag
towels
woollen gloves
shoe brushes

We sank under the weight of all these items. Our civilian clothes were taken away from us. While we were in ITS we would not be allowed to wear anything but uniform. In fact for the next quarter of a year we were strictly confined to camp: it was the longest three months of my life.

On the far side of the parade square from where we lived there was a huge building called the Fulton Block. Initially, we were kept away from this place, I suspect, in order to prevent older boys corrupting our innocence. The Fulton Block housed four entries at any one time. When our entry was in ITS the 26th Entry was the Senior Entry in the block, feared simply for its seniority and the fact that the boys in it were seventeen years of age or more, and thus bigger and tougher than fifteen year olds. There were also four wings to the building, each wing occupied by different trades. Rivalry was therefore between entries, between wings and between trades. Everywhere you looked you could find someone not of your kind and therefore a rival. Fights were not particularly common, but nor were they rare.

Our peaked caps, as I have said, was part of our Best Blue uniform and the best part of our peaked caps was the hatband. The 29th Entry teleg’s band was chequered yellow and red. We were called, or rather we called ourselves, ‘The Blood-and-Custard Boys’. I love that nickname. It smacks of something similar to an American Western gang, like ‘The James’ Boys’, or ‘The Dalton Gang’. At a recent reunion of the 29th on our 55th anniversary, I read a poem I had written entitled ‘The Blood-and-Custard Boys’, and noted the beaming faces and heard the cheers of men who were now in their seventies when I used the phrase. Identity is an important aspect of military life and one’s loyalty is pinned to that identity. In the army the regiment demands a soldier’s loyalty. With us it was entry, trade, squadron, then wing, in that order. Who were we? We were 29th telegs, No. 1 Squadron, No. 1 Wing.

Over the first two weeks, rising at 6.30 a.m. to the sound of Chris Barber’s ‘When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-bob-bobbing Along . . .’ over the billet tannoy and going to bed at 10 p.m., we spent all our time cleaning kit, learning to march, polishing the billet floor (a place so sacrosanct no man was allowed to touch it with his foot), being shouted at by adult NCOs and Boy Entrant NCOs for everything and nothing, having kit inspections, learning to fold blankets in the correct manner, laying out our PT kit in the correct manner and presenting the rest of our kit in the correct manner. There was the RAF way and there was the wrong way. We did indeed wonder if Hell had come for a long visit and was probably going to be outstaying its welcome.

That linoleum on the billet floor.

It was indeed holy ground.

Floor pads were made out of strips a foot wide, torn from our issue blankets and folded into two squares. (Short blankets meant cold feet at night, but everyone did it without a murmur.) These pads would be worn like slippers and boys simply skated with a gliding motion, not only to prevent scratching the surface of the hallowed lino, but also to polish it further to that glorious sheen required by the Inspection Gods. This did not mean that it would not require polishing again. Every Friday night, the evening before the weekly major inspection, boys would throw globs of yellow polish from a huge can on the main floor and on their bedspaces, and work that polish with elbow grease, often past the hour of midnight. Some boys, anxious not to incur the wrath of the Inspecting Officer and NCO, would lay out their kit there and then, and sleep under their bed so as to be absolutely ready in the morning.

The inspection itself was a nightmare. If the officer’s white gloves found dust on a surface, punishment was swift to follow. Even minor offences, such as a mark on a drinking mug, would result in that vessel being hooked up by the NCO’s pacemaker (a measuring stick that opened like dividers to check the length of an airman’s marching pace) and flicked out of one of the open windows to smash on the concrete path outside. The boy who owned the dirty mug would of course have to clean up the shards and buy himself a new mug out of the five shillings a week pocket money he received from the RAF.

Sunday was Church Parade. Some boys asked others to lock them in their lockers, hoping to avoid this hour-long visit to God’s barracks. They were confined with a bunch of comics and a torch until the return of the churchgoers. But of course the authorities were up to every trick and NCOs went through the empty billets rocking the tall lockers back and forth, finding heavy, yelling Boy Entrants inside. Others tried hiding up in the water tower, playing cards while the rest of us sang hymns and prayed. They too were found, were put on a ‘charge’ and were sentenced to jankers or fatigues (working in the cookhouse and other onerous duties during one’s free time) and had to peel spuds or clean greasy pans. Being of another religion did not get one out of Church Parade: Jews and ODs (Other Denominations) were gathered together and either went to their own religious buildings or were given onerous tasks.

At weekends senior boys would go into Wolverhampton, looking for pubs that would sell underage youths a pint of beer. Naturally they had an eye for the girls too and naturally got into fights with local youths. Late at night they would take the train home and, if lights out had passed, scrambled over the fences and gates, some of them getting caught and punished, others making it back to their billets home free.

As I have written, I knew what to expect more than most, my father being one of those dreaded and hated NCOs. I thanked God that dad was not at Cosford, but at RAF Bridgnorth, drilling conscripted recruits. I would not have survived had we been on the same station. Corporal Joliffe was our main drill instructor and he had a wonderful array of sayings, such as ‘Don’t march so close to the boy in front, lad. Do you want to get your name in the
News of World
?’ and ‘Fall out for a smoke. Those who don’t smoke go through the actions.’ The parade square was a loathed piece of ground and if we ‘eyes righted’ the damn flagpole once, we did it a thousand times before we left Cosford.

There were NCO drill instructors who marched us around and gave us weapons training, and instructors who taught us technical trade skills and education. The most famous NCO of all was Sergeant Rudge, nicknamed ‘Whatsay’. No matter what was said to Rudge, in a low or a loud voice, in a Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh accent, he would always come back with the question, ‘Whatsay, boy?’

We learned to march smartly, shoulder arms, slope arms, present arms and shoot with our Lee-Enfield Mk IV bolt-action .303 rifles. The bloody things weighed a heavy nine pounds, had a muzzle velocity of 774 yards per second, a range of up to 3,000 yards and a kick like a reversing Number 9 bus which left lovely blue-black bruises. I had a very weak right eye so I always shot my rifle using my left shoulder. They only made Lee-Enfields with bolts on the right side and though these weapons had magazines, usually holding five rounds, they were single-shot and needed to be reloaded every time. I used to reach over and work the bolt with my left hand. It was a very awkward movement, which once on the range had me lagging behind the other young would-be killers of the enemies of Britain, but I still managed to attain my Marksman’s badge. Bulleyes and magpies were good of course, but the main object was to group your shots inside a one-inch diameter circle somewhere near the middle of the target. If you did that you would get your Marksman, a cloth badge of crossed rifles worn on the left sleeve.